How to save disc image of Windows 7 partition?

I installed Windows 7 32-bit Home edition on a 200gb partition using Bootcamp. I am installing and tweaking the Windows installation and would like to take a snapshot of the system after I have installed all programs and settings.

I used Acronis True Image 2011 on my previous Dell laptop to take a disc image of my installation then used that on subsequent reinstallations using an Acronis boot disc and disc image accessed from a USB hard drive.

How can I reinstall the disc image of an Aronis True Image partition on a Macbook Pro 13" 2010 if part of the drive has OSX? Could I boot from an Acronis boot CD then reinstall the Windows partition on the MBP?

Staff Member

How can I reinstall the disc image of an Aronis True Image partition on a Macbook Pro 13" 2010 if part of the drive has OSX?

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Acronis is officially unsupported on the Mac, even under Boot Camp Windows and with the Plus Pack. Doesn't mean it won't work, just means it isn't supported. I use it to make images of external drives, but use Winclone for easy imaging of my Windows partitions.

Winclone is "retired" but still works fairly well in most instances. You can also just make a bit-wise image from Mac OS X with "dd".

Windows7 has a built-in system image creator. I use this after installing on BootCamp, so as to preserve my license activation without having to deal with MS. Note that this is different from the system restore feature that became popular with WinXP.

Control Panel > Backup and Restore > Create a System Image

It was a while ago that I last used it, but I recall that there are multiple options for the backup storage media type. Me, I created a disc image stored on an external HD and created a backup copy of that which I store on my NAS.

How did your Ghost 15 restore go? Did you boot from a CD and then restore directly? I presume you still have OS X on there too, 'cause a Windows-only Mac is really just a PC.

What's the problem you're running into? Winclone 2.2 generally works fine if you follow the recommendation of using uncompressed mountable DMG as the image format under Snow Leopard and W7.

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I'd run winclone again just to see what the error was, but I deleted it. If I get a chance, I'll download it again and see just for information's sake.

The Ghost install went beautifully. I backed up my OSX partition to a firewire drive, took the old hard drive out, and then installed the new one. Installed OSX on the new drive, migrated my old install over from the firewire drive, and ran bootcamp. Installed XP. Installed Ghost. Booted from recovery dvd and restored Win 7.

For some weird (and amazing to me) reason setting up a new, second firewire drive put my Windows partition into my start-up disk options. Before, it wasn't there. I am assuming that since I added a bootable disk, osx went looking to see what else was there, and decided to add my Win partition to the menu. Before that, I had to hold down the alt key every time I wanted to boot to Windows.

More detail than you wanted, right?

Now if I can only get some info on my post in the systems and services forum....

EDIT: Just got Snow Leopard yesterday, so I was running Winclone on 10.5.something-or-other last time I tried it.

Acronis is officially unsupported on the Mac, even under Boot Camp Windows and with the Plus Pack. Doesn't mean it won't work, just means it isn't supported. I use it to make images of external drives, but use Winclone for easy imaging of my Windows partitions.

Winclone is "retired" but still works fairly well in most instances. You can also just make a bit-wise image from Mac OS X with "dd".

B

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The last time I tried to use True Image to back up my Windows Vista System (a couple o years ago) on my MBP/Bootcamp install, I got a message about it does not support virtual images or something like that. I too would like to back up my system for an easy restore.

Acronis is officially unsupported on the Mac, even under Boot Camp Windows and with the Plus Pack. Doesn't mean it won't work, just means it isn't supported. I use it to make images of external drives, but use Winclone for easy imaging of my Windows partitions.

Winclone is "retired" but still works fairly well in most instances. You can also just make a bit-wise image from Mac OS X with "dd".

B

Click to expand...

The last time I tried to use True Image to back up my Windows Vista System (a couple o years ago) on my MBP/Bootcamp install, I got a message about it does not support virtual images or something like that. I too would like to back up my system for an easy restore.

Click to expand...

You need the "Plus Pack" to add support for GPT like Boot Camp disks under Acronis.

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